Subscribe
Iran, which is currently all over the news cycle, is mostly a mountainous and desert country, bounded by the shallow Persian Gulf to its south. You would not expect a shark attack, of all things, to occur in Iran. But it is time to think again.
In the far southwest of the country, just above the head of the Persian Gulf, is the city of Ahvaz on the Karun river. The river flows into the Shatt al-Arab waterway formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Al Qurnah, Iraq. The Karun has the highest amount of water and is the only navigable river in Iran. The Karun at Ahvaz is where bull sharks (Carcharhinus leucas) have attacked and killed people in the past.
These victims included Allied soldiers in World War II. Surprised? Read on.
“At the outbreak of the “three day war” against the Persians in 1941, 25 Indian Field Ambulance established itself in the school buildings on the banks of the river. In September 1941, 21 Combined General Hospital took over from the Field Ambulance and the surgical cases hitherto treated by them came under my care.
Among them I was surprised to find a Gurkha soldier who had had a forequarter amputation performed following a shark bite. It seemed extraordinary that such an accident could occur in a fresh-water river, some eighty miles from the sea and about thirty miles from the Shatt-el-Arab, that great river formed by the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates, which runs into the head of the Persian Gulf.
This was my first introduction to the sharks of Ahwaz.”
Thus begins a short piece, The sharks of Ahwaz, written by Lieutenant-Colonel R S Hunt of the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1951.
He adds that the Gurkha solider was the only service man attacked by a shark and the only patient who lived to tell the tale. “Twelve other civilian patients who came under my care all died,” writes Hunt.
According to him, most casualties occurred among young children and old people who were either undernourished or feeble with age.
The first attack victim was a small Persian boy, six years of age, who slipped and fell into the water. Attacked by a shark, the child was ferociously mangled. Brought to the hospital astride a donkey “through the desert sand and the ferocious heat of the Persian summer”, he died soon afterwards, writes Hunt.
Local belief held that the sharks lashed their tails, which caused victims to fall off rocks on shore and into deep water. But Hunt says this was unlikely, with a more probable explanation being that the sight of a shark so terrified people that in their hurry to get away, they slipped and fell.
Hunt once saw a shark from a suspension bridge that connected the old town of Ahvaz with the new. One evening before sunset, he was walking on the said bridge when he heard shouts of alarm. A Persian soldier levelled his rifle and shot into the water. As people tried to get away from the river, a shark came dangerously close to a toddler who stood petrified in the shallows. But it did not attack. A man soon waded and rescued the toddler.
Hunt ends with an ominous warning: “If you ever go to Ahwaz don’t bathe in the river!”
Why would sharks be found so far away from the sea in freshwater, you might ask like Hunt? The answer is that bull sharks are a unique species of shark. They can live in three types of water: fresh water of rivers and lakes, the saline water of the oceans and the brackish water of estuaries, where rivers meet the sea.
Not just the Karun, they have been found in several other rivers of the globe, far away from the sea including the Amazon, the Mississippi River, Lake Nicaragua and most recently in the Vaitarna river in Palghar district of Maharashtra near Mumbai.
As for the Karun, Brian W Coad, in his 2015 paper Review of the Freshwater Sharks of Iran (Family Carcharhinidae), published in the journal International Journal of Aquatic Biology, explains that, “They are said to invade the Khowr-e Bahmanshir and Karun River of Iran from July to September when freshwater flow is at a minimum and tidal penetration of salt water is at its highest. However, they do travel well beyond tidal influence in Iran. Local people along the Bahmanshir River near Tangeh-ye Seh in Khuzestan maintain that it is dangerous to swim there because of these sharks. They are occasionally trapped in nets set for the clupeid Tenualosa ilisha and may be caught on hooks. They are not as common as in the past (N. Najafpour, pers. comm. November 2000). Mohamed et al. (2015) record them from the Shatt Al-Arab near the Iranian border in June and July.”
Coad also notes that sharks have been recorded in the Euphrates by Greek geographer Pausanias, in his Guide to Greece, written in the late second century A.D. “One of the earliest distributional records is found in the Arabic work “Wonders of Creation” by Zakariya al-Qazwini published in 1263 A.D. and later translated into Persian.”
The cultural impact of shark attacks has continued to the present. “Freshwater shark attacks have even appeared in a novel set in Persia, “Harem”, by Mossanen (2002),” writes Coad.